Escondido city manager becomes county's highest paid

New 3-year contract gives Clay Phillips 12 percent in raises

ESCONDIDO  Escondido now has the highest paid city manager in the county after inking a three-year contract with Clay Phillips that includes staggered raises totaling 12 percent.

Under the deal, Phillips received a 3.95 percent hike on July 1 that increased his annual base pay from $225,800 to $234,719. That moves Phillips ahead of city managers in Poway, Chula Vista and Oceanside, who each make between $220,000 and $230,000 in annual base pay.

Phillips — who has run the day-to-day operations of Escondido since 2003 — is scheduled to receive additional hikes of 2.95 percent next July 1 and 4.95 percent in January 2015. Those will bring his base pay to nearly $254,000.

Salaries of municipal executives have come under greater scrutiny since 2010, when a scandal erupted because the city manager of Bell, a small Los Angeles suburb, was earning nearly $800,000 a year.

City managers typically get thousands in compensation beyond base pay because of perks like car allowances and the ability to convert vacation days into cash.

In addition, they are eligible for large pensions. Phillips, 56, would receive an annual pension higher than $200,000 if he continues working until age 60.

Richard Rider, chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters, said giving large pay hikes to city managers is not fiscally prudent and sends the wrong message to municipal labor unions that the city treasury is flush with cash.

“This is just a bad idea,” Rider said. “And because he wasn’t about to leave for another job offer, this was unnecessary.”

However Rita Geldert, executive director of the California City Management Foundation, said generous compensation is warranted because city managers oversee hundreds of employees and multimillion dollar budgets.

“It’s just as important as the chief executive of any large corporation,” said Geldert, former city manager of Vista.

Geldert said the raises given to Phillips are part of a statewide trend that began last fall. Many cities have begun to feel confident they’ve finally gotten past the Great Recession and the decreases in tax revenue that came with it, she said.

That’s the case in Escondido, where the city has posted large surpluses the past two years after burning through more than $20 million in reserves between 2007 and 2010.

Escondido Mayor Sam Abed said Phillips deserves a raise because he helped engineer that turnaround.

Abed also said Phillips should be among the highest paid city managers in the county because Escondido is a “full-service” city with a police department, libraries and sewer and water service. Many other cities contract out those services.

Phillips, the longest-tenured city manager in the county, hasn’t received any large pay hikes in several years. Before last week, Phillips got three small hikes totaling less than 4 percent between 2006 and 2011.

The new contract takes some perks away from Phillips — bonuses for a personal computer, an annual physical and travel to conferences with his wife — and also eliminates a requirement that Phillips be among the county’s three highest-paid city managers. Escondido City Council members said that rule, created in 1999, had become outdated and inflexible.